Losing Nelson (6 page)

A regular treaty then, signed by accredited representatives of all the forces opposed to the French. Horatio, when he hears of it on the twenty-fourth, is violently opposed, not to the terms offered the French but to an amnesty for the Neapolitan Jacobins. There are heated arguments. The cardinal has given his word; the treaty must be
honoured. For Horatio the republicans are vile traitors who have supported an invading force. They must surrender unconditionally and throw themselves on the royal mercy.

Could they have had any faith in this? Surely they must have known what to expect. Maria Carolina was frightened and ferocious; Ferdinand’s vindictiveness was notorious. Yet on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the rebels came out of their forts. The fate that befell them was predictably atrocious.

So why did they do it?
In this question lay all my trouble. It was as far from solution that February night as it had been when I first stumbled on it three months before. Until I found an answer, an
acceptable
answer, I could not proceed. I had been over the events hour by hour, as far as I had been able to find reliable authority for them, especially the forty-eight hours between Horatio’s arrival in Naples and the rebels’ quitting of the forts. I had puzzled so long and so earnestly that it had all gathered to a sort of bruise in my mind; touched even gently, it would throb and hurt me, driving me always to seek refuge in the less ambiguous triumphs of his career.

Refuge I found now, as I sat there, in thoughts of his splendid arrival in the city just ten months before, the conqueror, still a seabeing, still untouched by this corrupt and sensual place. Already, off Stromboli, in early September, his squadron has been joined by the
Mutine
, bringing from Naples the first letters of congratulation on his victory. Sir John Acton, the prime minister of Naples, expresses the felicitations of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina addressed to the Saviour of Europe. Sir William Hamilton, on behalf of himself and his wife, Emma, addresses him as “bosom friend.”
You have now made yourself, my dear Nelson, immortal
. In fact, the acquaintance at that point was slight; they had met briefly five years previously, when Horatio was a young captain, still whole and unmutilated. Since then there had been Corsica and the blinding of his right eye, there had
been his exploits at Cape St. Vincent, the fiasco of Tenerife and the loss of his right arm. Now this astounding victory at Aboukir Bay.

In the same batch of letters are two from Emma. All of Naples is mad with joy, she is walking on air with pride at having been born in the same land as he, she is dressed from head to foot
alla Nelson
—even her shawl has blue-and-gold anchors all over it. She urges him to write or come soon. He has written already, expressing the hope that his mutilations will not make him the less welcome.

The British ships are sighted at dawn on September 22 off the island of Capri. A Saturday. I had then never looked across that most famous of bays, but I had imagined it often, that dawn advent of the hero, that slow approach to the jubilant city … I knew what it would have been like to see it from the quayside, the faint sails in the half-light, now seen, now lost, drawing nearer as the light strengthens, silhouetted against the tawny cliffs of the island. Then sunrise, a single track of flame across the expanse of pale water …

Ten o’clock. The bay is a platter brimming with sunlight. Hundreds of pleasure boats have put off from the shore. I see their sails and hulls reflected in the water, shades of blue, scarlet, dark orange. The boats make ripples in the surface, but to my mind there is no gash of white; it is as if the colours themselves have power to cleave the water. Bands of musicians have come out to meet the ships. The orchestra of the San Carlo Opera, in a barge strung with red, white, and blue bunting from stem to stern, plays “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia” and “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” The martial strains resound across the bay and carry to the approaching ships. The
Vanguard
responds with the boom of cannon.

The quayside is thronged with cheering people. We stand there at the prow. Tier upon tier of houses rise above us, pale yellow, rose pink, parchment colour, terracotta, rising into sun-hazed darker slopes of cypress and ilex. The balconies of the houses are festooned with
flags, hung with baskets of carnations and roses. The ambassador’s barge comes out to us, greeted by a salute of thirteen guns. It draws alongside. Lady Hamilton, all dressed
alla Nelson
, flies up the ladderway. One of the most beautiful women of her time. She exclaims, “Oh, God, is it possible?” She faints in my arm and falls to the deck.

A left-handed handshake from Hamilton; elderly, thin, distinguished. His words are not recorded. An hour later a further salute, twenty-one guns this time. Ferdinand I, ruler of the Two Sicilies, is approaching in his state galley, painted scarlet and gold, with spangled awnings. Some months away still the fiasco of his expedition, the ignominious flight. Perspiring in his black velvet and gold lace, he makes a speech of welcome. There is gratitude in that big-nosed face as he hails his “Deliverer and Preserver.”

As the
Vanguard
moves in stately fashion towards the waiting city, we sit down to an elegant breakfast. Among the illustrious guests is Commodore Caracciolo, Bailli of the Order of Malta, admiral of the Neapolitan navy, who is in charge of the nautical education of the king’s nine-year-old son, Leopold. He is only a few months away from court-martial and death at our hands by public hanging as a traitor to his king.

As we step onshore, the air is full of fluttering wings. Hundreds of fishermen with captive doves in wicker cages have been standing at the quayside, waiting for just this moment. They raise the cages aloft, release their captives. As the white birds mount upwards, I try to follow their flight, but my eyes are dazzled by the brightness of the sky, the sunlight hazed with dust, the rain of petals. I am confused by the music and the shouting of the people. We gain our waiting carriage and go clattering away over the black lava paving stones, up towards the British Embassy, Palazzo Sessa, whose façade is draped with red, white, and blue hangings.

Something brought me back from this, perhaps some sound outside.
Sitting there in the calm light of my study, my eyes felt this daze, this bewildering assault of sunlight and movement. Half involuntarily, I glanced up at the ceiling, as if to follow those beating wings, those floating petals. But there was only the Victorian stucco, crumbling here and there, of the cornice. Has any man before or since, any conquering hero whatever, made such a triumphant appearance in such a magnificent setting?

I doubt it, really I doubt it. In the carriage clattering up to the embassy, there is not much talk. Fascinating to my mind, that short journey. The whole situation, all that was to happen, already contained there, in the words and glances. Four people in close proximity: Horatio, Sir William and Lady Hamilton, and Miss Cornelia Knight, the authoress, who had accompanied the Hamiltons in their barge and was to relate the details of this historic meeting in her autobiography. Three principals, then. First—always first—the hero, still sick, suffering from the prolonged anxiety of that long pursuit and the stress of the nighttime battle in the hazardous shallows at the mouth of the Nile, lonely, in need of comfort, in need of the mother we lost so young; Emma, the blacksmith’s daughter, exuberant, beautiful, excessive, ridden by follies, full of admiration for him, experienced in love; Sir William, aristocratic, cultivated, world-weary, aware of declining powers, prepared if need be (though perhaps not knowing it yet) to lend his wife or even give her, as she had been given by his nephew to him.

So we go clattering uphill in our open carriage, leaving the pleasure boats and the white birds and the thronged quayside behind us, up to the Hamilton residence, easily recognizable at a distance by those vivid hangings of scarlet, white, and blue. After arriving, some hours of repose. While we are resting, darkness falls. The three thousand lamps that have been set in the façade of the palazzo all spring to life, and the words “Nelson of the Nile” blaze out over the city.

We take our places at the dinner table. A distinguished gathering. Among the blue uniforms are those of Troubridge and Ball, constant companions of those Naples days. Your two favourite captains. It was they who carried the note to Ruffo that June morning the following year, the note that seemed to promise so much, that brought the Jacobins out of their forts. Your note. I didn’t want to think about this; I wanted to hold on to the scene of our triumph, there in the candlelight, honoured guest, perhaps unsettled by the steadiness of things after so long at sea, perhaps confused by the beauty of fullbodied Emma and the slimmer versions of her that looked down from the walls in a multitude of guises and postures, copies acquired by Sir William before the original was securely his: teenage rosebud Emma in a black hat and pink silk gown; Emma as a bacchante, auburn tresses in artful disarray, flimsy draperies loose about her; Emma as Saint Cecilia, robed in white, palms closed in prayer, eyes looking heavenwards.

Your eyes were bombarded with Emma. Tired eyes, but not too tired to be beguiled. Were there glances already? Was there already something you wanted to repress or deny? Is that why you said you preferred Emma as a saint? Is that why you found occasion to say, with emphasis, there at the table, that the happiest day of your life was not the victory at the Nile but the day you married Lady Nelson?

Your room was on the upper floor. It had a broad semicircular window looking southwards over the bay towards Capri. The entire opposite wall was covered with mirrors. You could see the pale disc of the moon rise from the fiery mouth of the volcano as if exhaled upwards. Below, on the silver water, the ruddy torchlights of the small boats, fishing for tuna. And all this again, this blending of ruddy and pale, reflected in every detail in the glass of the wall. And when, in the days of your sickness, the hot September afternoons when you were feverish and she came to tend you, to see to your comfort, as she
moved about the bedside you would see the lines of her body through the light summer clothes. And every movement, the turn of her shoulders, the sway of her hips, would be reflected in the glass. Repeated reflections like a repeated caress. Sweetness of the loins under the bedclothes …

All this was to come. But how strange it must have seemed to you as you lay alone there on the first night, in that room of multiple reflections. It was the first time in six months that you had slept away from your ship.

T
hat night my sleep was broken by dreams. As so often, he was with me and there was the accustomed sense of mourning or lamentation, the massed sense of it and somehow the grain of it in the air. I never see his face clearly. I see it only in glimpses, in obscured light, a fleeting impression of the mouth, the brows, the line of the jaw. I am always strongly aware of his presence, shadowy, indistinct, but immensely potent. He knows I am there, he expects certain things from me, but I am not sure what. This time we were together on that ill-fated expedition up the San Juan River in Nicaragua.

I had been reading Pocock’s account of it—the fullest there is. Horatio saw a good deal of action on land, a fact that is sometimes forgotten. In January 1780, as a twenty-one-year-old captain in command of the
Hinchingbrooke
, a frigate of twenty-eight guns, he was ordered away from the West Indies to assist the army by landing a force at the mouth of the River San Juan, which rises in Lake Nicaragua
and flows into the Caribbean Sea. This was the naval part of a grandiose plan to transport troops up the river, storm the Spanish forts that controlled the upper reaches, and take possession of the lake, thus at one stroke cutting Spanish America in half.

What had not been much studied by the army high command, if at all, was how to get troops totally unacquainted with tropical rainforest, along with their artillery and essential supplies, through the hundred miles of the river’s course. No-one knew the position of the enemy strongpoints. No-one knew what conditions were like in the interior. Apart from local Indians, nobody was thought to have navigated the river since the days of the buccaneers, a century previously. Horatio’s task was to escort a convoy of troopships to the river’s mouth and wait there on guard till they returned.

There were, however, problems. None of the five hundred or so officers and men who had been assembled had the smallest experience of river navigation; many of them were already sickening and should have been in hospital instead of preparing for active service. And the preparations had taken too long. The dry season was already two months old; the river was so low that boats often had to be unloaded and hauled by men wading in the shallows. Now enter Horatio. He does not believe that the soldiers can manage it unaided. So what does he do? As always, he is practical, unhesitating, prompt without rashness. He offers to leave his ship at the river’s mouth and lead the way with two of her boats and fifty of her crew. Major Polson, the commanding officer, is delighted to accept.